War of all against all

Recently, I managed to escape for two weeks from the Moscow cold and darkness to the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, to the Spanish countryside. The place is not pretentious, from the category of “economy”. Spain itself also does not bathe in chocolate – unemployment reaches 25%. Somewhere it’s dirty, somewhere it’s not clear why large areas are fenced off, in the place of the park there is a nondescript wasteland, how buses run – it’s impossible to figure it out at all, sometimes you won’t get the staff in the store. That is, this is not some particularly prosperous and well-fed West with soapy sidewalks and perfect service. In my opinion, the standard of living is approximately comparable to the Russian regional center. Well, it was comparable before the ruble fell.

But somehow, sitting in the evening on a bench near the shopping center and watching the visitors walking back and forth, I suddenly realized that in two weeks I had not seen a single act of aggression in communication between people. On the streets, in cafes, shops – nowhere. There were different situations, misunderstandings arose, our cards were buggy, but we didn’t have cash with us, we went to the wrong place and paid for the wrong thing – but this never even led to a hint of conflict. All around, people were shopping, discussing something, their children were running around the rows of shops, hiding behind hanging clothes and lying in the aisles – but there were no shouts, let alone slaps. Not once in any store or cafe did we hear employees or waiters swearing among themselves, although they dropped the dishes in our presence, and they could not find the goods, and someone confused something and someone interfered with someone. Passing by the construction site, we heard workers shouting to each other – I don’t know, maybe it was, of course, a Spanish obscenity, but it sounded cheerful and good-natured.

At some point, I was overwhelmed by the realization that you are resting here for this very reason. The sea, the sun, orange trees are wonderful, but the nerves rest, first of all, from the absence of aggression spilled in the air. Spanish, English, German, Chinese, Moroccan families were walking around, some were quite loud, but there was no aggression in their voices and gestures. And the Russians, by the way, also walked, and also did not swear.

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Returning to my homeland, I went for groceries to our nearby Pyaterochka. I stayed there for about 15 minutes. During this time, some man yelled at the cashier for not having change money. A married couple in their 30s choosing sausage exchanged remarks like: “What are you, a fool? I told you not to take this rubbish! “Yes, you’re sick of it already, take whatever you want!” The female employees who arranged the goods loudly discussed their claims to the absent colleague, who had become “insolent”. Grandmother barked at her grandson, who reached for a chocolate bar, and when he did not obey, she hit him on the arm.

None of them looked like a man who had somehow lost his temper, going through a serious conflict. No, this exchange of acts of communication was ordinary, routine. They were just talking. And only I, with my hypersensitive perception of other people’s emotions and intonations due to my profession, and even after Spain, then felt sick for half an hour after a simple trip to the store.

Our norm

I have already had to write and talk about the spilled aggression that is characteristic of Russian society, and the most striking thing about it remains precisely its “normativity”, its commonness for most fellow citizens. My temperamental neighbor from above often shouts to her husband in the process of family communication, easily penetrating in a shrill voice through the concrete floors of our Moscow high-rise building: “I seem to be talking to you calmly!” He booms in response to a long and unprintable. They have been living together for many years and, I think, do not consider their marriage to be particularly unsuccessful.

Once, returning from some business trip on a high-speed train, I looked at the monitor screen on which the cult film Love and Doves was played. About the life of the people as it is, at least in the view of the authors. The film was without sound, only the picture. I looked and realized that I see a deeply pathological relationship with a huge number of acts of aggression per unit of time. On the screen all the time someone fell into hysterics, yelled at someone, threatened someone, tried to hit someone, pointedly throw something on the floor, the facial expressions of the characters expressed the whole palette of aggressive emotions, from anger to contempt. At the same time, it was meant that this is kind of like a family and everyone loves each other and is afraid to lose. And the people themselves are kind and sincere. They just live like that. They talk calmly.

In any team in any city on any topic, if you let the process go by itself for a while, after 15 minutes you find a group scolding children, teachers, “bad” parents, bosses, authorities, America. Scolding someone is generally a universal way to start and maintain a conversation – in a train car, in line.

In the media space in general, turn off the lights. Absolutely any news causes a flurry of aggression, and from any end of the political and ideological spectrum. It’s just that some stigmatize the old woman who did not pay for the oil, others demand severe punishment for the guards who detained her, still others curse the owner of the network and all the “snickers” along with him, fourth cover Obama for sanctions, fifth Putin for the economic crisis. The communicative goal of four out of five statements is aggression. Name the culprit. Call it nicer. State the threat. Offer a card.

TV is better not to hear even out of the corner of your ear. There, on talk shows, opponents yell at each other or everyone yells at some frightened people in unison; they begin to joke… This is all in the intervals between promises to cover the world with nuclear ashes and burn Kiev with napalm. Everything and everyone is brought down and tamed non-stop; accusation, humiliation, threat – three communicative pillars on which almost any monologue or dialogue shown on TV is built. The weather forecast is almost the only exception.

We live in this for years, constantly, and therefore we no longer notice, understand, or hear how toxic this environment is, how it creates a constant background level of stress, insecurity, and eternal irritation. In spring and summer a little better, of course – still the sun, grass. In the New Year a little easier – still a Christmas tree and a holiday. November and February are at their peak.

Geopolitical aggravation

In recent years, it seemed to get better. People calmed down a bit, kinder, began to get used to the beautiful, comfortable, pleasant, began to smile at each other. But just then the money began to run out, and people were urgently driven to war, which turned out, as is usually the case, not so small and not exactly victorious.

At the moment, society is pumped up with aggression nowhere further. More than a year of disturbing music, tense voices and charred bodies from TV. More than a year of pumping hatred for anyone who thinks otherwise. More than a year of promotion of paranoia about “enemies around, they want to destroy us.” Yes, all this is largely superficial and artificial, just look, for example, at the photo of anti-Maidan gatherings in cities in which they did not use administrative resources for collection – a dozen and a half of urban madmen with experience stand proudly in the February wind, so as not to forget and forgive. But, alas, you can’t write off everything only on imitation.

There is every reason for spilled aggression now. The euphoria of getting up from your knees is over, there is no new dose yet, well, Debaltsev will last three days. And most importantly, everyone understands that things will not get better in the future. Maybe someday it will, but at first it will definitely be much worse. An unpleasant shadow looms ahead, alas, too familiar to our genetic – and ordinary – memory. The shadow of the Time of Troubles, collapse, devastation, the shadow of the “war of all against all” in the conditions of the collapse of public life and reduced resources. After all, we all saw in real time how quickly and easily you can turn even a poor, but peaceful and normal life of an entire region into a Wild Field, ruled by people with weapons, with mined roads, torture cellars, lynching, robberies and other delights ” hybrid war. And the whole world will calmly chew their morning sandwich, looking at photos with pools of blood on your street. Perhaps your blood.

And it is not very clear what will keep us from this. The war of all against all described by Hobbes can be resisted either by a strong legitimate state, or a strong society with a powerful social fabric, with horizontal connections and the ability to self-organize, or a deep faith or morality. With that, and with another, and with the third, we are dealing with seams.

Our state is now able, at the very least, to perform its functions only in the conditions of free flows of petrodollars, as before it could exist only by wasting a huge human resource. In a situation of a worsening crisis, it is likely to increasingly demonstrate helplessness and incompetence, and most importantly, deep contempt for the population, as for some unknown reason, ballast getting underfoot.

Civil society is no better. All forms of independent public activity, horizontal ties, which have just begun to emerge and develop in well-fed years, have been practically crushed in the recent period of “crackdown”. The “patriotic unity” that accompanied the whole story with Crimea and Novorossia is pseudo-unity, it did not create any new social capital, on the contrary. Firstly, it was very strongly inspired and controlled from above, that is, there was and is much more vertical in it than horizontal. And secondly, joint crimes unite only for a short time, then common guilt and common lies destroy trust and intimacy between “accomplices”, they don’t want to see each other, let alone build something together.

Morality and spirituality? Don’t make our Iskanders laugh. It is impossible to love your neighbor and at the same time incite hatred and war, threaten the world with destruction. Religion, church? Does anyone else expect anything from this side other than calls to imprison/flog the next “insulting shrines”?

Maybe at least unity in the face of a common enemy? Alas, the obligatory hatred of America imposed on society has nothing to do with real healthy aggression against a real common enemy. It is powerless and irresponsible, because America is far away, not represented in any obvious way, and you can hate it without doing anything and without making any serious choices, just idly chasing aggression in a circle and radiating it into the surrounding space. At the same time, the minority hates Putin just as powerlessly and fruitlessly, but they also cannot do anything, and they also do not ozonize the public atmosphere. All the real and imagined deeds of the enemies, like all the leaden abominations of the regime, evoke in the souls of most Russians not a healthy anger, but a spilled, dreary irritation with a hint of despair that spills out, excuse me, who it turns up against – a cashier in a store, a child, on any counter-transverse.

Frustration

There are two ways out of any frustration: mobilization and a breakthrough, or resignation to defeat and rethinking the experience. Resources are needed to win. They do not exist – the ceiling of the possibilities of the “new great Russia” over the past year, it seems to me, has been realized by everyone, except for the very sick in the head. And the more talk about the “insidious plans of NATO”, the greater the feeling of their own vulnerability. The exit of aggression to the top, in a claim to power, is quite firmly blocked by repressive laws and the horror story of “Maidan, destroying life in the country.”

And truth is needed for humility. To admit defeat is to admit guilt. Conscience, which, when it breaks through the radiation of the TV tower, quietly but persistently hints that we have all done a very big meanness. At the same time, the truth is already almost equated with high treason, so it’s better not to induce sharpness.

The Russians are trapped. They were encircled by America and Putin, committed mistakes and fear of the future. If frustration does not find an outlet either in struggle or in sadness, it turns into fruitless, obsessed aggression. This, to put it simply, is the mechanism for the emergence of post-stress disorder (familiar to Russians in the form of the Afghan and Chechen syndromes). It was precisely for this reason that at one time it became the subject of close study, because a person in this state creates many problems for himself and those around him with constant irritability, anger, eternal dissatisfaction with everyone and everything around. When a whole society experiences something like this, it is very difficult to live. Such an atmosphere exhausts the psyche and nerves, impoverishes interactions, and devalues ​​any goals and undertakings.

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There is an exit

She’s hard to resist. But it is absolutely necessary and, more importantly, possible.

First of all, the toxicity of the environment must be realized in order not to think that it is the child’s fault, he was completely spoiled, or you yourself are crazy, or everyone around you is completely goats. We objectively experience serious frustration, although different people because of different things: some are helpless in the face of the impending economic crisis, some are sorry that Novorossiya did not take place, and some are in despair that they cannot prevent aggression against Ukraine. Moreover, we are constantly being deliberately influenced in order to worsen our condition, reduce criticality, paralyze the will, drive our thoughts and feelings into a run in a circle “enemies everywhere, everyone does not like us.” Even if you yourself avoid propaganda, it affects the people around you, and they affect you.

Is it possible to somehow save yourself, build yourself a “foil hat” that would delay the toxic radiation of spilled aggression?

Of course, the most sensible thing to do when you find yourself in a toxic environment is to minimize contact with it. If possible, avoid engaging in pointless discussions about “enemies.” Now there is no point in arguing, everyone knows and understands everything, and if they have chosen some position, then they have reasons for that. Leave everyone to his conscience – she will figure it out. If it does happen, set a clear limit for yourself: I will spend 10 minutes on this argument and not a minute more, and then just don’t read the opponent’s next remark and get back to your business.

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Friends, family, work – these areas must be protected from spilled aggression in all possible ways. Change the topic of conversation with family and friends if it smells like another five-minute hate. If you come home “wound up” by the external environment, if you have read “dirty” on the Internet – take a break, take a shower, drink tea before talking with your family, especially with children. And never turn on the TV in front of the kids.

Next, if something revolts or scares you, ask yourself – what can I do? Sign a demand for release, transfer money to help refugees, go to a rally or buy dollars and buckwheat – whatever you think is useful and right. Do it and mentally mark yourself for the result, for a piece of territory reclaimed from chaos. If you are angry at something or afraid of something, but nothing can be done about it in principle, then try to get rid of anger and fear, they make no sense. Use any opportunity to relax: walking, meditation, breathing exercises, playing with children, reading books, doing your favorite hobby.

Antidotes

The third thing you can try to do with a toxic environment. – make it less toxic by producing and distributing antidote wherever possible. Antidotes, as we remember, are a resource, truth and warmth. Let’s consider in order:

Heat. It’s simple. If you feel that your interlocutor is annoyed and overwhelmed, try to express sympathy, support and defuse the situation. Make it a rule: at least three positive acts of communication with strangers daily. A smile, a joke, a petty concern to hold the door, simple words like “Good afternoon!” and “Thank you very much!”

If possible, do not be fooled by the logic of war, do not start dividing everyone into friends and enemies. There is a war, and there are enemies, it is irresponsible and stupid to deny it, but our task is to keep it within the narrowest possible boundaries, not to give a single extra territory of our life to the war.

It is true. To stop arguing does not mean to be silent. To call a spade a spade is useful and correct. No need to convince anyone, but no need to participate in lies. If you at least sometimes manage to speak the truth with warmth – plus five hundred points to karma. It’s hard, but rarely works. For example, it seems to me that the right tone was chosen for the campaign for the Anti-Crisis March: warm, with images of spring, indicating the seriousness of the problems, but without whipping up hysteria.

Resource. It is very important. It is very important to have a sphere of implementation, an activity that makes sense and that works. When it seems that everything around is rushing into the abyss and degrading, it is especially important to create and improve – at least something, at least in something. If there is useful work, work not just a lot, but a lot. For myself, for example, I understand that I would probably have fallen into depression if it were not for my work. Productive labor, with a clear result, with normal relations with people in the process – this is also a reclaimed territory of normality. If there is no work, invent it, create it again. Make plans, think about new projects – even if it is not yet realistic to start them.

Don’t be afraid to have values ​​and talk about them, don’t play along with cynicism. When there is nothing to lean on, it is especially important to have a foothold inside.

Be sure to look for opportunities to help people, at least a little. Relatives, neighbors, acquaintances and strangers. Consider what can be done. There are many simple technologies to help those who are in trouble, and they are actively used even in very rich and prosperous countries. Why not study them, for example, on the Internet, and try to implement them? Here, for example, is a simple idea: a platform for meeting those who need help and those who are ready to help – “We are together”. Look what a glorious, non-bloodthirsty two-headed eagle turned out there.

The war of all against all cannot simply be canceled; you cannot escape from it by closing your eyes. It can only be blocked, rendered harmless from within, then creating pockets of “peace in time of war.” Each act of help, understanding, simple sympathy is a thread in the social fabric that can only keep us all from falling into hell. And maybe the whole world is with us.

More: http://spektr.delfi.lv/novosti/vojna-vseh-protiv-vseh.d?id=45622470